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PICKET: Al Qaeda didn’t just disappear from CIA’s original Benghazi memo but also from FBI counter-terror lexicon

Lawmakers told reporters on Capitol Hill Friday that former CIA Director David Petraeus testified that the White House edited out “Al Qaeda’s involvement” from the agency’s original talking points. According to Fox News: (bolding is mine)

Former CIA Director David Petraeus stoked the controversy over the Obama administration’s handling of the Libya terror attack, testifying Friday that references to “Al Qaeda involvement” were stripped from his agency’s original talking points — while other intelligence officials were unable to say who changed the memo, according to a top lawmaker who was briefed.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News that intelligence officials who testified in a closed-door hearing a day earlier, including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Acting CIA Director Mike Morell, said they did not know who changed the talking points. He said they went out to multiple departments, including the State Department, National Security Council, Justice Department and White House.

“To me the question right now is who changed those talking points and why. … I’d say it was somebody in the administration had to have taken it out,” King told Fox News. “That, to me, has to be pursued.”

But should that really be a surprise, though? As pointed out by Liz Sheld of Breitbart News, the piece I wrote on September 27 showed that even the FBI counter-terrorism manual does not include the term “Al – Qaeda.” In fact, it does not even include the terms: Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah, or Muslim Brotherhood. PJ Media’s Patrick Poole found this counter-terrorism document that the FBI attempted to claim did not exist.

As I pointed out previously:

The Obama administration’s response to media inquires over what happened during the deadly terrorist attack on our U.S. consulate in Libya that took the lives of four Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, has been that it is currently under investigation. However, according to CNN, the FBI is only investigating the attack from afar and “bureaucratic infighting between the FBI and Justice Department, and the State Department on the other” appears to be delaying the investigation.: (bolding is mine)

FBI agents have not yet been granted access to investigate in the eastern Libyan city, and the crime scene has not been secured, sources said.

“They’ve gotten as far as Tripoli now, but they’ve never gotten to Benghazi,” CNN National Security Analyst Fran Townsend said Wednesday, citing senior law enforcement officials.

Last Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that an FBI team had reached Libya earlier in the week.

“In fairness to the secretary, it may be that she wanted to be coy about where they were in Libya for security concerns. That’s understandable. But the fact is, it’s not clear they’ve been in Libya for very long,” Townsend said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.”

“They had difficulty, and we understand there was some bureaucratic infighting between the FBI and Justice Department on the one hand, and the State Department on the other, and so it took them longer than they would have liked to get into country. They’ve now gotten there. But they still are unable to get permission to go to Benghazi.”

FBI agents have made a request through the U.S. State Department for the crime scene to be secured, Townsend said, but that has not happened.

“The senior law enforcement official I spoke to said, ‘If we get there now, it’s not clear that it will be of any use to us,'” Townsend said.

The FBI team has conducted interviews of State Department and U.S. government personnel who were in Libya at the time of the attack, Townsend said, but the FBI’s request to directly question individuals who Libyan authorities have in custody was denied.

It took the administration over one week to declare the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was indeed a “terrorist” attack and many wondered why the declaration took so long. Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly reported that sources told Fox News that U.S. intelligence knew that the strike against the consulate was the work of terrorists within 24 hours of the attack. So why the delay in the actual declaration from the administration?